There Will Always Be Punctuationby John McGroarty

​I suppose you could call this a spiritual tale; or a story of the soul; or even a psychological account of a religious nature incorporating the long awaited but short lived return of the semi-colon. Or, if you like, the clash of two post-postmodern types and the reason why no good will ever come of anything now. It concerns an old Satanist friend of mine with whom I spent many nights downing the Guinness and setting the netherworld to rights and with whom I have now lost touch, sadly, but for my sanity, thankfully. To God or to the other dude with the tail and the horns. Take your pick nowadays. That is if you can ever truly lose touch with such as he. Is he not perhaps a part of our own psyche? I first met him in the Michael Collins Irish theme bar in Barcelona twenty odd years ago. It was late and there was an excruciating Irish duet of crooners, the two Brendans or the Devlin Brothers or the Blood of the Barley or something discordant like that, belting out misty melancholia to indifferent impolite drunken applause when I felt a presence at the bar behind me. I was pretty pished at the time and in a spiteful twisted mood and without an introduction or a by-your-leave turned and asked him if he thought you had to be really good musicians in order to perform so badly. He laughed and said that, no, they were just shite. I was glad to hear the tones of a fellow Glaswegian and decided on making him my pal despite his slightly toffee accent and his blonde hair. I am a Celt and genetically programmed to run a mile whenever I see a blonde person approach. We’re like that, the Celts. We’ve been fleeing the white man for thousands of years. I became even more interested in him when he introduced himself as Kenny F**k Jesus. Pure class, I thought. I admit I stared gobsmacked for a bit. Even though I was a long time lapsed and four sheets to the wind it took me a few minutes to get over the blasphemous nature of what he had just said. We retired to a quieter back bar and he told me the sad story of how young and innocent Kenneth Ronald McClure had first been transfigured into the watery-eyed anorak clad diabolical Kenny F**k Jesus that I had in front of me.

Back in the times before we all lost hope Young Kenneth had an idyllic childhood in the posh Glasgow suburb of Bearsden and knew nothing of the goings on just down the switchback road in Drumchapel where I was wasting my youth hanging around street corners, tanking the EL D, chainsmoking Regal King Sizes, and getting waded mad mental into scheme wars to pass away the tedium and the ennui of long summer nights with no future or hope of a better life in sight or even in the imagination. However, contrary to what you, oh successful middle-class fluty reader, might think, young Kenneth’s fate was a lot worse than that awaiting all the neds and ne’er-do-wells who haunt and flock the darker recesses of the now expanded mind of this writer like hoary Banquos rattling their now empty cans of Special Brew and tapping fags down a cosmic winding path off into eternity. For in a way our lives were natural ones and well in consonance with the blood bespattered and hard-drink soaked history of Scotland. Perhaps when Scotland finally gets its freedom a new king will battle and chib his way out of the Drum and set up a dynasty that will last a thousand and one years. Wee King Bammy the first. The Black Bongo. The Royal House of McGeady. That will really be the end of the illusion. Take it from me. I have experience in these sorts of things. Oh, long may we be oppressed! Young Kenneth was surrounded by brothers and sisters with names like Myrtle and Fleur and Ogden Nash (the parents had hopes of a poet in the family) and little Henry and Adriana and Blippy and Banjo. His was a world of falling flower showers in spring and fluttering butterflies and croquet matches every summer and breathless sleigh rides through the snow to supper at grandmamma’s and botanical summer holidays on Corfu investigating and documenting in a big bumper annual the rare strains of the Aegean lizard and the Kassiopi toad. Of early to bed and coming out balls and nannies who spoke French and super soft bum roll and mulled wine on the Eve and brimming over Christmas stockings on the Day and monocled top hats and on tap Penguin biscuits and cheesy crackers while we schemies in the Drum were on the dole and sniffing glue and dismembering one another out of sheer boredom and despair and unknown ambition. One day, I swear, I will write my memoirs and call it the glue-sniffer’s guide to Glasgow. Just see if I don’t. Take you down the old trails and paths of a misspent youth. OK, I am exaggerating a bit. Let’s just say young Kenneth had it easier than we did and leave it at that. Yet all this Arcadian existence was destined to come to an end. In 1979, when young Kenneth was just twelve years old, and his mamá and papá the dangerous side of forty, his parents discovered the Lord. They stopped being posh hippies and converted to Evangelicism. The whole family became born again Christians. Young Kenneth never forgave them and immediately marched off to the library to read up on Satanism. His cosy life was now gone forever and he was yanked by the ear out of the progressive school and sent to the strict Evangelicals for an education in the ways of John Wesley. Young Banjo, who was a very precocious eight year old, made the mistake of applying reason and asked at table, echoing, unbeknown, Nicodemus, how he could go back into mummy’s tummy given that he was already over a metre tall and a fair little fatty, for which his now God-fearing father administered his first ever sound thrashing. Young Kenneth’s life now became a sacred round of praying and church going and alms-giving and humbling himself before the Wesleyan version of the great master of all creation and all creatures large and small. The hatred of all things hallowed and unprofane grew and grew in the breast of Young Kenneth till one day when he was sixteen he couldn’t take it anymore and he got to his feet in the middle of the service, cutting the Reverend Jardine off in mid-fiery parable, and in front of the whole gathered congregation cried to the heavens a painful howl of f**k Jesus! Of f**k the whole holy ship and all the saintly sailors and ministers and Churches across the land and the seven seas and other things too profane and blasphemous to put to paper. There was an astonished silence in the pews and a mere two hours later Young Kenneth, now converted forevermore into the antichrist figure of Kenny F**k Jesus, and destined to be an outcast and wanderer hence till the very crack of doom, was on a coach to London where he would spend the next ten years as a barman in many cheap dives across the Smoke and studying the occult sciences in his free time before chucking it all in and buying a plane ticket to Barcelona. We exchanged phone numbers and arranged to meet the next night. I still see him staggering away into the night before stopping and swivelling round and screaming, from the very pit of his being, up at the Sagrada Familia cathedral a gut wrenching F**K JESUS. This great work of Christian art didn’t budge or blink or shrug or take him in its arms. The tourists continued taking their photos and the police started to move towards him. He opened his mouth to shout again but was hauled away mid-profanity by the hood of his anorak and the last I saw of him was his less than rapturous face peering through the bars of the meat wagon. F**K Jesus, he mouthed to me as they shot past. I swear he was Christlike in his suffering. I remember thinking that he too was, in a perverse way, a work of Christian art himself and wondering to what could a man in despair turn if not to Jesus Christ. The last port for all the lost souls and drowning men and steaming alcoholics down through the centuries. Kenny F**k Jesus at that moment seemed to encapsulate the whole tragedy of modern man. To what benefit the gaining of a soul if all else is lost including poor Young Kenneth’s childhood. What price then that eternal bliss and happiness? Where do we go from here?

One of the things I will always remember about Kenny F**k Jesus was his anorak. He wore it everywhere. Even in bed. To the beach over his trunks. To work. To the discotheques that would let the likes of us in. For the hours when he would sit silently meditating on the powers of the malign spirit in the wardrobe. And if clothes maketh the man, he was an anorak in all senses of the word. I had never heard such fastidious knowledge of heavy rock music and the unhallowed arts. He was an encyclopaedia of demonology and a devout worshipper of Led Zep, Ritchie Blackmore, Deep Purple, and ACDC, and an obsessive viewer of the films of Stanley Kubrick, in which he claimed there was a hidden message from the forces of the Dark Lord. We spent days on end scrutinising DVDs over and over again and splatting mosquitoes and bugs onto the dirty walls of his wee room in the pensión on Calle Bailén. I can still hear the music booming through my mind. Zarathustra. On the Blue Danube. Open the pod bay door, HAL, for the love of the Devil, open the pod bay door! Writing it backwards. Sideways. Replacing the letters for numbers. For wild beasts. For species of bat. Nothing. What is its inner meaning? What message does it hold? What does it all mean? We never discovered. And then there was the constant flow of the bevvy and the roll-ups and all the science fiction. Lovecraft and Lem and Arthur C and Phil Dick. Dennis Wheatley novels and all the Hammer horror flicks and the mad rapturous obsessive viewing of Rosemary’s Baby. Kenny F**ck Jesus always called it, in hushed tones, by its Spanish title, La Semilla del Diablo. He used to claim that it was a true story. He had a big blow up of the screen poster on his room wall. The green sky and the smoke and the wee rocking black pram. And all the weird pals he had and was constantly introducing me to. A German woman called Gertrude with short wiry hair and a slight buck in her teeth and a stereotypical German infantile sense of humour who was always burdened under a gibbous sky and quoting Lovecraft. In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming, she would cry inscrutably, staring intensely across the William Wallace Scots bar towards the toilets as if she expected him to emerge doing up his fly at any moment. A beautiful seductive sexy Romanian who stopped speaking to me when I asked her half-cut if all the people in Romania were like the characters from Dracula. I still regret that quip. Two Dutch guys called Roy whose eyebrows met. Posses of Latin Americans Satanists of every stripe and sing-song accent. A Castro cursing Cuban doctor who was a security guard in Carrefour megastore. A Venezuelan guy who wore a baseball cap and cowboy boots and always called me gringo and claimed to have once plotted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and had a plump daughter called Yamila named after some infamous Devil worshipper from the Arabian Nights. Of course, legions of Spaniards and Catalans of every shape and size and all brown-eyed and over-Gothic but friendly with it called José and Dani and Francisco and Jorge and Sergio and Ferran and Merichel and Miriam and Mireia and Maribel and Mari Carmen and Maria Lliusa and Maria this and Maria that and Maria the other in an endless list of female names beginning with M and praising the Virgin to continuous consternation and satanic squawking. A bald Galician who could talk mystically for hours about the Medieval history of the kings of Aragon and their pact with the Unholy Trinity and surreptitiously picked his nose. A Machiavellian Italian whose name I can’t remember but who always wore FBI glasses and winkle-pickers and slipped in slinky Italian verbs when speaking Spanish and was a big silver-tongued hit with all the M’s. Easy meat, he said, the Spaniards were. Too nice and trusting. An Italian would knife you in the back. And Heather Bush from Texas who said she could ride a real horse and had attended black masses in Dallas and spoke perfect Mexican Spanish and always made the same joke about having two horticultural nouns for names. A smattering of diabolical cheesies from Scandinavia who all hated Gertrude. A weird dude from Hull who was deciphering Ulysses the whole time I knew him and spoke Spanish with a ridiculous Mexican Speedy Gonzalez accent. A mad white Russian anti-poet who hated Gertrude even more than the cheesies. Really, they made all the nutters and bams of my Drumchapel youth seem normal and I oftentimes ached for a good scheme battle and a cool refreshing bottle of Buckie to wash it down. That, as far as my memory serves for anything nowadays, was Kenny F**k Jesus’s Devil worshipping circle gang. Or should I say eight-sided star gang? A mishmash of a misfit army of radical anti-clerics and Kenny F**k Jesus was their messiah and unspiritual anoraked guide. I feel a deep sadness when I think back now on how the harmless pursuit of Devil worship has been eclipsed and driven out of the realms of the possible by the world that we have come to inhabit since those simpler times of the nineteen nineties. I feel the world has taken a turn for the worse!?! That perhaps they worshipped too well and finally got what they wanted. Aye, beware of what you wish for! Maybe Gertrude was right and the dead Cthulhu has appeared in the world once more from out of the stinking William Wallace Scots bar’s toilets. Though he’s forgot to do up his fly. When I say they were Devil worshipers I am of course, yet again, exaggerating. They did hate all things Catholic and Christian and religion in general (even harmless little Buddhism) and plotted its downfall and they did have very strange conversations for people under thirty like what song they would like to have played at their funerals or if Jimmy Page was really a Satanist. There seemed to be two camps on this. I sided with Kenny F**k Jesus as he was diabolically learned and could decipher the lyrics of Stairway through a secret code to be found in Aleister Crowley’s Book of the Law. He claimed to know through sources encountered in his wardrobe that the Zep had reached a Faustian pact in exchange for fame. I suppose it made sense. When he mentioned Crowley that was the first time that he told me about the book he was writing. It was to be an updating and compendium of the great antichristian writers of the past. A modern book of Horus. When I laughed and commented that nobody really cared and that he was fighting a battle already won and we were just having a bit of fun he looked at me with deep burning hatred in his watery eyes. He pulled up the hood of his anorak and turned his face away. Do what thou wilt, he said, almost under his breath. That was the beginning of the parting of the ways for me and Kenny F**k Jesus. To tell you the truth I was already bored with his crowd and had started to look around for another group of rootless cosmopolitans to latch myself on to. What he could not take was a discordant voice and that is what I have been all my life. God help me. Only Groucho Marx would understand. If Kenny and his infernal bunch are all mad esoteric conspiracy nuts, then I’m the other part of the modern conundrum. The uncompromising individualistic contrarian whom no one can tell anything and who never hangs around long enough anywhere to really find anything out. Whatever, the post-postmodern absurd fun had worn off and I was out of there.

It was shortly after that that Kenny F**k Jesus became briefly infamous. He and his smelly band of diabolists had a campaign to stop the recrudescence of religion rising up and taking over all our lives and telling us to be kind and caring and forgive our neighbours and love one another instead of worshipping the self and chasing the buck. Mostly it was minor things which I had even joined in on for, dare I say it, the hell of it. The heckling of priests during services; the leaving of foul smelling demonic plants and turds in church pews; minor vandalism and graffiti in new age shops; the painting of satanic symbols on public buildings and church façades; as above so below; the eye in the eight pointed Ishtar star; 666s aplenty; goat faces in pentagons; the Leviathan cross; another brief return of the semi-colon to this story. It was after I had moved on that they really upped the ante. I think it was Gertrude who introduced the idea though I can’t be sure. Or, perhaps now that I think of it, the Speedy Gonzalez guy from Hull who had obviously picked up his Spanish in Mexico. They all took to wearing skeleton fancy dress suits and their acts became more and more daring. Or desperate, you’re probably thinking. The graffiti was no longer enough and they started trashing churches and little shops selling Buddha and Native American knick knacks. Even I was pissed off and considered turning them in when they started taking on the Great Spirit. If I believe in anything, it’s Wakan Tanka and the healing powers of the Medicine Wheel! Some of this got in the papers and the police were soon on their trail. But it was their boldest act that made them famous and country-wide news for a couple of days back in 1999. Maybe now with retrospect it was all part of the millennial madness. Who can tell with a guy like Kenny? The seat of the Catalan government is the Generalitat Palace in Plaça Sant Jaume. And in one of the wings the chapel of Saint George has sat harmless and forgotten for over five hundred years. If you venture inside, you’ll see him, the great Sant Jordi, surrounded by Gothic stone, in full miniature armour, impaling the dragon with his lance and setting Catalonia free of the forces of chaos and discord. I fear he has much work still to do. This little place of worship, which even the most fastidiously researched tourists eschew, became for a short period twenty years ago front page news when Kenny F**k Jesus and his fiendish followers took advantage of an open doors day and barricaded themselves inside dressed in their skeleton costumes. It was a Saturday morning and I was having breakfast in front of the goggle box when I saw it on the news. I knew it was them as they were showing CCTV footage of the group entering the chapel and there was Kenny F**k Jesus with his famous brown 1970’s anorak on over his skull and bones suit. It was then that I truly got the anorak. It was like Sebastian’s teddy bear. Like Rosebud. A moment frozen in time. Of when he was a happy child before the madness of the world broke in. When his balanced life went out of kilter. His turn to Satan was to rebalance it all. Restore the lost golden mean of his youth. They had a list of comical demands to be met or the little statue of Sant Jordi would “get it”. So they said. They wanted all the religious paraphernalia removed and a refurbishing of the chapel and, Gertrude said in her perfect Germanic Spanish on the telly, a statue of the great Cthulhu, dragon wings and octopus head, to be set up in the centre of the room and that the chapel be dedicated to his cult and the whole building be redesigned on non-Euclidean geometric principles. The whole country was fascinated and there was round the clock news coverage of the occupation and every tertulia chat show was full of talking heads splitting every hair and measuring every non-Euclidean angle of the events. If there are angles to be measured in that branch of mathematics. Wee Jordi Pujol, the president at the time and a staunch defender of his saintly namesake and holy mother church and the victors of Lepanto, refused to negotiate and ordered them to be starved out. They lasted twenty hours and were frog marched off to the modelo prison live on Catalan TV. Kenny F**k Jesus had his anorak tightly zipped and the hood up. I later read in the papers that they had all pleaded insanity and no further action was taken against them. When I went back to their old haunts there was no trace of them. They had seemed to disappear in a puff of sulphur into the dark night, leaving me to think that I had imagined it all and having no satisfactory ending to this true-life weird tale. That would have to wait.

Almost two decades went by before I heard anymore of the baleful Kenny F**k Jesus. And it was the strangest co-incidence of one of those things that seem most highly improbable and uncannily unlikely but nevertheless actually happen against all the dice of all the possible universes in all possible and impossible space-time equations. I was driving with my wife in an out of the way neighbourhood of Barcelona when she got a call to go somewhere urgently and I got out and got on the metro to go home, neither being wanted nor needed in the emergency. There was hardly anyone in the wagon but I felt a strange floating otherworldly sensation flowing through me and I sat down and closed my eyes. When I opened them the famous brown anorak was there in front of me. I looked right at him for a couple of minutes but he seemed to be in another place. In some other dimension. Kenny? Kenny?? Open the pod bay door! I called to him but he sat glazed-eyed in his own world and, sometimes, looked down at a book he held in his hands. I got up and squatted down in front of him and looked into his eyes. Kenny, I screamed. Kenny F**k Jesus. Then a slow light of recognition came into his eyes. I asked him if he thought we had to be really good musicians to have lived so badly. He smiled. Licked his lips. No, we’re just shite, he said. He then took his hood off and I could see his eyes and face and he wasn’t his old self. His eyes were no longer watery or his long horse face pale and bleary. Are you okay, Kenny F**k Jesus, I asked him and he nodded his head. Well, as my old granny used to say, in the end, the apple never falls far from the tree. It’s Kenny Loves Jesus now, he said. He handed me the book in his hands, and it was the Bible. The page was open at the prodigal son parable. Kenny Loves Jesus smiled weakly. I think the Lord has arranged all of this, he said. I was praying for the help of a true friend and here you are. I sat down next to him and he started to explain what had happened to him over the years. After his moment of infamy in the Generalitat Palace he had a full nervous breakdown and spent a year in a Spanish asylum. He then bummed his way around the world. To South East Asia; Japan; India; Goa; a year in Berlin; six months in Budapest; deportation from the US; and finally return to Scotland and reconciliation with his family; another attempt at the semi-colon as an aid to narrative concision. Then he returned to Barcelona. We were now off the Metro and in a smelly wee bar in the Raval on our third beer. He had taken up with Gertrude again and three years ago they were married. Unlike Kenny Loves Jesus, Gertrude had remained a militant Satanist and he had to keep his conversion secret. Six months ago they had had a child. A little boy. Gertrude had wanted to name it Cthulhu but after weeks of argument had accepted Howard Phillips after her hero Lovecraft. Kenny Loves Jesus had only ever had one true friend, he said. Me. Me? He needed my help now and had prayed for my return and took my appearance as a sign that the Lord was on his side and had truly forgiven him for his former support of the Unholy Trinity. For a minute I too believed in some sort of destiny. He had what he called a matter of the utmost ethical importance hanging on his conscience which needed resolution. We can no longer do what thou wilt, he said. Only what He wilt now. I then told him that I would do anything he wanted on one condition. That he take off that 1970s anorak and burn it and start living in the present. Kenny Loves Jesus thought for a minute, looked off towards the bar, went to slip his hood up, stopped, and quickly took it off and handed it to me. I stuffed it in my backpack. He then explained the moral problem weighing him down. Now that he loved Jesus it was imperative to have young Howard Phillips baptised. Now. Quickly. Before he learned to speak German and grassed him up to Gertrude. He had that old burning fever in his eyes. I need your help, friend, he pleaded. It was of the greatest importance that neither Gertrude nor any of her Satanic pals caught on to the plan. Kenny Loves Jesus claimed that they were legion and were everywhere and were watching his every step. That’s why he had to do it with the help of a friend. At night. Just slip away with the baby and enter the church and baptise him and be back home before Gertrude even knew he was away. The Lord was guiding his moves now and sent me to him and had dictated the plan to save the innocents from perfidy and everlasting hellfire. I would pick him up at the corner of his street at two in the morning and we would drive to a church in some small Catalan village, break in, baptise the baby, and be home tucked up in bed by four bells. May the God almighty truly help me for I agreed and we synchronized watches for zero hour the following Saturday night. On the way home I went down to the Besòs river next to the bin lorry graveyard and built a little boat of flotsam. I set Kenny’s anorak alight and pushed it out into the river. I felt that this act had some significance somewhere. Where I wasn’t sure. Maybe God would see it and keep helping poor prodigal Kenny in all his mental travails. That was one of my problems: seeing significance in things that could have none other than none whatsoever.

I spent the next couple of days studying possible targets in the towns around Barcelona for Kenny Loves Jesus’s madness. I have always been a sucker for weirdos and an industrial size loony magnet. I suppose it’s my fate and the wise say it is always better to love your fate than flee from it. Amor fati! We used to live our lives by that maxim back in Drumchapel when I was a young ned. Amor fati, wee man, aye right ye are, we charged around shouting to each other. I settled on a church in a square in Badalona, a mere twenty minutes from my house. It was not one of the chungo places of the town and was always really quiet during the day and I imagined would be so at night and that we could leave the car up on the square. I picked Kenny and the baby up at ten to two. It was a gentle balmy June night and the stars were out. The sort of weather that used to lead to murder and mayhem in the Drum. The baby slept through the whole misadventure. We played Led Zep IV softly on the CD player for old time’s sake. We even sang along sadly but determinedly when the great track came on. And then with gusto at if there’s a bustle in your hedgerow. Kenny Loves Jesus interpreted the hidden message from Satan but I’m not going to betray his trust as he said it was just for me and a thank you for helping him. It was like being privy to one of the great mysteries of the universe. All I will say is that it was something along the lines of, ok, people, enough’s enough and you’ll all have to serve me in a different way from now on and start listening a bit more to the boss or we’ll all be in the shit even more than we are now. Even me. We parked up on the kerb and I broke a side window of the church and Kenny Loves Jesus got in. I handed him young Howard Phillips and climbed in after him. We both looked at each other. Wow, what a truly ugly ugly church, we both thought. I went to say uglier than Gertrude but remembered that she was now his wife and cut myself short. Kenny prostrated himself at the altar and murmured some incantations I couldn’t make out. Then we got down to business. I was to be the Godfather and Godmother rolled into one and held the baby. Kenny played the part of the priest and in less than five minutes the baby was out of the danger of eternity in limbo. Kenny smiled feebly and shrugged. Just in case, he said. Aye, just in case, I thought, the oldest wager in cosmic gambling! I burst out laughing and just at that minute some security siren went off and there were feet noises coming from the sacristy. I tried to pile out but Kenny pleaded that he had the baby and had to get away. And besides he had a record of church sacrilege and would be sent to prison this time and the poor little baby would be all alone with Gertrude for decades and into the most important formative years. Okay. Okay. I shunted him up and out through the window and handed him the baby. I heard him legging it off into the night. I tried to climb up but too late the priests were upon me. One of them was a big bruiser and he held me firm in a bear hug. At first I tried to deny that I was even physically there. That this was all a dream. That I was in charge of my own dream and that they were my creations and had to obey me and open the church doors, let me go, go and have a few glasses of church wine and hit the hay and forget all about this. I could hear the approaching wail of a police car. I then tried to explain that I was suffering from long term depression and had been out driving, got lost in Badalona, and decided I just had to get into the sanctuary and have a jaw to jaw in direct with the Big Man. That He was my one and only saviour. That I had always been a good Catholic and mass attendee back in the Drum. That I had dreamed of being a missionary priest and always gave my pocket money to the black babies when I was a child and had played football for five consecutive years for Saint Benedict’s boys’ guild and had even scored a goal against the unbeatable and formidable Saint Theresa’s guild from Possilpark when Chic Charnley was in the team. That was a lie of course. That they could call up Father Gerry or Coach Jack Harran or the old Monsignor guy for a reference of good conduct. That I was sure they were still alive. That I had a cousin who was a nun. Two cousins. One had been tortured by a remote tribe in Africa and would vouch for me. All of this was gushing out of me as the police put the handcuffs on and marched me out into the patrol car. I spent a night in the cells trying to think how I would explain this to my wife and children. She just shook her head and my children and their friends took the piss for a few weeks. It made it into the local Badalona press and there was much tutting and shaking of heads in the barrio about the mental health of some of the guiris who had come to live in the country. Kenny disappeared again and until this day I have never heard anything else from him. I was left with a police record and a satanic revelation about the future of the world but no one would believe me so I will just keep schtum, cross my fingers, and hope for the best. I just want to say one more thing before falling silent. Kenny, if you’re reading this, wherever you are, and whatever extreme position you’re taking on whatever subject, don’t ever ever get in touch with me again; and if you see me on the Metro or on the Ramblas, make like you don’t know me; I’ve indulged your youthful Satanism; I’ve tried with you a thousand times to open the pod bay door; I’ve burned your anorak; I’ve helped you baptise your son; I’ve spent a night in the pokey for you; so I will let the semi-colon have the last word; maybe there’s some sort of meaning in that somewhere; for if now we all live our lives obscurely alone in mad imagination, and all else is lost to the mind of man; happily, there will always be punctuation.

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About the Author

​John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story, Rainbow, his novel, The Tower, and his two short fiction collections, Everywhere and Homo Sacer, are all McStorytellers publications.